Old folk have been grumbling about ‘young people these days’ at least since Socrates allegedly groused that the youth of Athens “have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise”. No doubt, there were misery-gutses on the African savannah who warned that no good would ever come from getting down from the trees and walking upright. As for this newfangled banging-rocks-together thing…
Hand-in-hand with such geriatric harrumphing is usually a tendency to wax lyrical about the Good Old Days. Even though, as H G Wells said, the first hint of toothache would focus our thinking, the habit of looking at the past through rose-tinted spectacles is a hard one to break.
So, a list of ‘things children today will never experience’ can mostly be responded to with: half their luck.
After all, who’d miss these?
Paper map
Until relatively recently, no one would dare begin a road trip without a stack of maps in the glove compartment. All children know now is the mechanized voice calling out the directions from the Google Maps app on a smartphone.
Movie rentals
Blockbuster went out of business as it just couldn’t stand up to the competition of companies, like Netflix, who offer streaming services. Children will never have the experience of adding their name to a waiting list in order to rent a popular movie that never seems to be available in the store.
Rotary phones
Forget the landline and pay phone, modern-day children will never lay their hands on a rotary phone unless it’s in an antique shop.
Staying at a ’50s-themed AirBnB recently, our kids got a first-hand demonstration of just how tedious dialling a phone number used to be. On the other hand, they also discovered just how satisfying it really is to slam down a phone receiver.
But it’s an indication of just how thoroughgoing the communications revolution of the last couple of decades really has been, than how many phone-related things have disappeared.
Pay phones
As pay phones become less and less common, children will never know what placing a collect call means.
Memorizing phone numbers
Most adults will remember having to memorize the phone numbers of their house landline, friends and family back in the day. With the convenience of smartphones, children these days will most likely never have to memorize a phone number.
Phonebooks
It’s hard to believe that these giant, yellow books used to appear on everyone’s front doorstep. Will children ever understand what it’s like to page through the tissue-thin book to find a number or what it means to be “unlisted”? Probably not.
Now what will coppers use to interrogate suspects without leaving a mark, though?
Oh, and I still remember the first phone number our house got, in the late ’70s.
Other once print-based media have disappeared, too. Not always for the better. Sure, having instant access to the vast library of the internet is more convenient than going to the library or buying encyclopedias. On the other hand, the Deep State can’t exactly come into your house and cut out whole sections of your encyclopedias. It’s a lot easier to memory-hole digital media, though.
Besides, it’s hard to look sophisticated and intelligent by hanging a Google logo on your study wall.
As for…
Print TV listings
More and more people are opting for online versions of publications, newspapers and magazines. Weekly printed TV listings used to be a coffee-table staple for knowing when a program would be showing.
It used to be a ritual to buy the Thursday edition of The Age solely to get the “Green Guide”, the pull-out TV, radio and cinema guide. Whole careers were built on appearing on TV Week covers.
But nothing makes me feel old, though, than seeing what still seem like new-fangled toys popping up in a ’memberberry clickbait article. I mean, 30 years ago was the ’70s, wasn’t it?
Tamagotchi
Kids these days will never understand the agonizing pain experienced when your Tamagotchi died. The simple technology was highly coveted in the ’90s and while it still exists, the level of hype will never be the same.
Game Boy
Cell phones, iPads and other devices provide the gaming fun that was once had with the modest Game Boy. Children these days will never know what it’s like to hold a technological device that doesn’t have a backlight.
Furby
There are many toys the children of today will never hold, and Furby has a good chance of being included among them. The debate continues around whether this is actually a good thing – did anyone ever figure out how to turn off the annoying creature?
Slinky
The once-omnipresent children’s toy has been replaced with more modern toys. Children may never know the hours of fun that can be had watching the metal object ‘walk’ down the stairs over and over.
Unless you grew up in Australia, where double-story houses were vanishingly uncommon. There wasn’t much fun in walking a Slinky down the two steps from the back door to the yard, I can tell you.
But, hipsters being what they are, some of the things ‘kids will never know’ are actually making a minor comeback as symbols of Cool.
Camera film
Do you remember the anxiety of bringing your camera rolls to the store to get developed and hoping that the photos didn’t end up completely ruined or blurry? Smartphones and digital cameras will prevent children from ever having this experience.
Except, as I discovered on my last visit to a camera shop to pick up an accessory for my DSLR, there’s a whole range of brightly coloured disposable film cameras being marketed at the Instagram generation. And, at a recent millennial wedding, there were a bunch of brand-new Polaroid cameras on hand for guests to take pictures.
After the vinyl revival has come the cassette revival. Old TDKs are going for ridiculous prices on Ebay. And along with the cassette naturally comes the…
Walkman
The former cultural icon has since been replaced by digital devices. Children will never understand that the only way people used to be able to listen to music was by popping a cassette tape into this bulky contraption.
With the walkman comes the cassette tape, another outdated technology that kids will most likely never see. They will also never experience the dedicated and well-thought-out process of making mixtapes and giving them to friends or crushes as presents.
Except that the mixtape is also making a comeback as an icon of urban cool.
As the Death Cab song says, She may be young, but she only likes old things. And modern music it ain’t to her taste. She loves the natural light captured in black and white.
Writing letters
Snail mail is a thing of the past. Emails and text messages are the way we communicate now and children will most likely never know the joy of fetching the mail and discovering a letter from a friend or pen pal.
MSN
In fact, a small clique of youngsters, mostly women, unsurprisingly perhaps, seem pretty keen on rediscovering that very joy.
Whether they write in cursive or old-school print, members of the LA Pen Pal Club drive for miles to meet one evening a month at Paper Pastries […] they [are] drawn to handwriting letters because they like the slower pace.
To Haas, writing a letter is unlike any other part of her life and is sort of paradoxical when she thinks about it.
Yes!
That’s a truism I learned as a writer: writing is thinking.
That’s as true of sending a letter to a friend as it is of writing an article. You don’t really think about something until you write it down. Just as with visual art, there’s a synergy that flows from brain to hand. When it’s slowed down by the friction of writing by hand, thoughts slow and gather and achieve new clarity.
So, maybe the hipster girls are onto something, there.
